


Tape 628A: Transcript Translated

by tolype



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29105034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolype/pseuds/tolype
Kudos: 1





	Tape 628A: Transcript Translated

Sprawled over  1,505,700 miles,  the Northern Witherwood Taiga was never supposed to be a place for the idle wanderings of Earth’s frailest species. And yet we seemed to derive a perverse joy in our reckless quadrilles beside that cold maw every year, lighting up the dark edges of the Witherwood Taiga with our little lights and our little violins and bells and moonshine and clouds of breaths, all our ephemeral little toys dwarfed against the ancient hundred-foot tree trunks. We brought our kids and dogs and matches and meats. We knew we couldn’t claim the Taiga. We claimed the boundary instead. 

Eventually they cordoned off hundred-mile sections of the Taiga for any grizzled wayward freak who had an existential bone of hubris to pick against one of the rudest and most formless parts of the planet. Usually they came back. Five hundred and twelve didn’t, that first year. A proper deterrent, that five hundred and twelve, because the next year, ten didn’t come back. The next, four. The next, one hundred and one. We didn’t stay cowed for long. That was Priya’s year. She was the one after the one hundred, the last one before Pavel Mishurin, head of the Lung Taiga Park Rangers, shut down our town Lung’s access to our cordoned section of the Taiga. We didn’t like that, no way, but he was her father, and she was only seventeen, the second youngest to have gone missing there, ever. The youngest belonged to a family from the West, all of them with white skin and fair hair, touring the borders of the Taiga the year before. 

Eight-year-old Rosie Trevor vanished outside their Exchange house after an early return from a hike because of a sudden incoming snow storm, still in her little furry white-brown outfit and brand new matching boots and apple-red scarf, like a bleeding cracked open coconut. Her footprints wandered off into the dark and disappeared. Hounds picked up her red scarf eighty miles away at six o'clock the next morning, twisted around the finicky clawed branches of a Siberian Larch, one of hundred-millions, twenty feet up-- no blood. So we conceded defeat and put up fences and colourful signs and bouquets of flowers and enforced fines and got our kicks elsewhere.

I knew the history of the Witherwood Taiga. We all did.

“I know you know the history,” Sorkhiv, the current head of the Lung Taiga Park Rangers, said to me. “And I know your history in that history, how your friend Priya bit it there-- well, hell, will you take the position?”

“Yes, prick. I have a personal interest in gaining more data on the  _ avoirrus aventus _ .” At his scowl, I added, “The harpy thorn.”

He inducted me into the Lung Taiga Park Rangers then and there as a Consultant-Warden bio-specialist. He gave me a team of three people and we did our jobs over the course of October: we investigated the emergent species of flora,  _ avoirrus aventus _ , an invasive black pointy bush which grew in thickets that sprouted all over the serrated boundaries of the Witherwood within six months, as if the Taiga had finally grown teeth. It appeared nowhere else in the world to our knowledge. We weren’t the first to discover the toxic extract within each twelve-inch needle, but we were the first to be approached by the Siberian Special Operations Department for our research on it.

Vincent Boriv, Anna Karkat, and Silus Oppent spent at least five years each working with Sorkhiv personally as Rangers on a type of mentoring system. I never cared to ask about it. I just knew they turned to him the way sunwaif clusters turn to guardian lusks when the temperature drops below four degrees Celsius. They laughed when I told them this.

October 1st, our first day, Sorkhiv lead us to a thicket of harpy thorns. Each bush had three to five orb structures attached, about three feet in circumference, fitted with dozens of fine, tapered needles. I lingered behind, taking biting sips from a flask etched with silver ships tangled up in the appendages of a kraken that Pavel Mishurin bequeathed me. 

When we reached the cluster, I put my thick work gloves on, pulled out a lens and a razorblade and snipped the tips off a dozen ends from each bush in the thicket. Sorkhiv smoked. Karkat and Oppent took out devices of their own and silently went in opposite directions, holding their devices at different angles. Boriv ambled over to me, almost hitting his head on a branch, and bent to watch. In his pants, a .22 Winchester Magnum sat tucked barrel down. When he noticed me looking, he grinned and mimed a bear, quite theatrically and enthusiastically. He was quite bear-like in stature himself.

I took a moment to appreciate the hoots and crunches and wingflaps and buzzes and whistles and whispers of the Witherwood. Then I unpacked two shovels. “I want to get at the roots before the earth gets too hard to dig through. Careful though. Then take samples and label them.” He did as I instructed. We both dug as Sorkhiv watched us. It took about an hour to unearth a complex system of roots, black and gnarled and thin, but I soon realized the roots extended far beyond each bush. I followed a single root twenty-eight feet away with no signs of any other ligaments underground. No other flora grew nearby the harpy thorn either, only naked winter-hard Siberian Larches. Sorkhiv called me back before long, and my old back twinged from all the hunching, so I reluctantly returned for a break.

Karkat and Oppent had traveled out of sight. Sorkhiv had a device out now, too. The three of us nibbled on some jerky and walnuts and cranberries and traded stories about growing up in Lung. 

“What’s that thing do?” I asked Sorkhiv.

“It keeps track of temperature, time, and chemical components in the air,” Boriv said eagerly before Sorkhiv could respond. “And it operates as a signal between any scanner linked to it. It’s called a PARE scanner. Project Anemone Resonance Enhancer. SSOD requires us to--”

“Look,” Sorkhiv said with a significant, deep frown at Boriv. “Karkat and Oppent are back. Let’s go. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

I said, “But it’s not even four yet! It won’t be dark for a while,” but Sorkhiv shook his white-bearded head and gestured to Boriv, and Boriv began packing everything up, so I gave in and took several long swigs from my flask. Karkat and Oppent arrived at a light jog, both of them out of breath, somewhat disheveled, with the whites of their dark eyes showing madly, like asymmetrical mirror images appalled by one another. They murmured to Sorkhiv, whose weathered face grew more lines and cracks like the crumbling grim vault of an old canyon. Boriv tapped me on the shoulder and turned around and rubbed his hands all over his back and made kissing noises. For the show, I let him drink from my flask. He belched hugely, and it echoed, and we laughed together, making more echoes. As the echoes faded, I gathered up our toolboxes and rucksacks. We left a different way than we came. Boriv said they probably saw some bears, and when I opened my mouth to call to them to ask, Boriv told me not to interrupt them because they were making an official report to Sorkhiv. The three of them moved at a quicker pace than Boriv and I. Around this point I suspected they were not quite my team to manage.

“It’s awfully quiet,” I remarked after some twenty minutes. A real wintry silence had descended over the bare trees. The last sound I remembered the forest making was our own, like Echo the nymph failing to seduce Narcissus. As we trekked, to the left, down a steep curdled hill rife with frozen, warring roots, a staircase became visible, a simple one made of cut limestone, clunky and porous, like one from a desert village across the ocean, stretching maybe fifty feet up. It made me laugh to see it. The air thronged with my laughter and then nothing else.

“Stop it,” Boriv said, staring straight ahead.

“Why? That’s so bizarre.”

“Stop it,” Boriv said again, between his teeth, in an octave so low and with his brow so bulged and eyes so open that the hairs on my arms and neck rose. I stared at him, but he wouldn’t look at me. When I looked up, Sorkhiv, Karkat, and Oppent were all staring at us from ahead. Oppent and Karkat both munched at their lips while Sorkhiv turned away. Their PARE scanners beeped thrice, in three segments, quick succession. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees over the next half-hour. By the time we returned to the outpost, I had a new appreciation for their PARE scanners, and was glad to have left early.

That night, I dreamt about a staircase in the woods. This staircase trundled out of the ground upside down, the earth rumbling and shaking, and beneath it a series of black underground tunnels stretching on and on disappeared when I blinked in astonishment, and the staircase then appeared right side up, spiraling up to the blotted out sky, rails and steps rickety and punctured with rust-eaten holes. Tied around one of the rails in a perfect bow of wool sat Rosie Trevor’s red scarf. When I took a step forward, Priya put her hand on my shoulder.

I woke up early, while it was still dark, and went to the lab underground. I flashed my Rank 4: Rashmi Pim clearance badge at a screen to unlock the door. It sent a line of code somewhere with the information that I stood there at that time, probably. In the lab, I established that the DNA from the harpy thorn bushes had no evidence of genetic recombination or even evolutionary lineage-- all of it was identical, which didn’t make sense, because all organic life on earth needed a predecessor, unless all the DNA we collected yesterday came from a single organism, spiderwebbed out over a significant distance. As I worked, automatically I touched the similar raised white webs of vitiligo on my face. The thicket itself with the cluster of harpy thorns stretched outwards for about thirty feet, and then that singular root, who knew how far that extended? It wouldn’t be impossible for it to be the same gigantic organism-- Earth saw stranger things in the Congo Basin-- but I needed more data.

At this point I studied the extract itself: inky black, glistening, with the viscosity and consistency of maple sap above five grams; below, it moved water-smooth. Each needle harbored less than two hundred milliliters of the extract, but the extract itself didn’t form in the needle. The electrical impulses of the plant sent it up from its base cauldron, and the needle dropped from the stalk once its weight surpassed what it could carry; it didn’t ooze to offset the weight. Seeds?

We often happened upon animal carcasses close in range, anywhere from brown bears to wolves to wild turkeys to carrion birds to deer to moose to water fowl and more. I found extract anywhere from their intestines to their lungs to their brain stems to their eyes to their veins to their skin cells. They usually looked beat up. Death by harpy thorn, then, was clearly not a painless or peaceful way to go. I learned that how quickly it acted depended on the maturity cycle of each bush’s nodule, accounting for body weight and metabolism. Consistently I would find an enormous remnant dosage of  dimethyltryptamine in the brains of the animals, more than there would ever be produced in any other type of death. If I got to study a very recently dead, tiny brain, like that of a falcon or a thrush or a goose, I noted the significant trauma of the anterior hypothalamus, dorsal ventricular ridge, and various bruised synaptic structures. My team did not much care for my analysis of dead birds.

“So you prick your thumb and it triggers the release of DMT and you hallucinate and go crazy,” Boriv said. “No wonder the SSOD is all over this.” At my questioning look, he said, “You know, Siberian Special Operations Department. Why does our military need another way to creatively cause suffering?” 

I asked him, “Why do male chimpanzees go on raids to rip the testicles off of other troupes of male chimpanzees? Do you think they get bored of that?” At this he punched the air and danced on his feet like a chimp.

After eight days of driving, hiking, fastidious digging, grumping, being called back early, and shivering in the Witherwood Taiga, I confirmed my hypothesis.  Their roots could extend beyond an average of eighty five feet to fruition into an extension of another harpy thorn bush. Once I counted as far as one hundred and twenty feet, but Sorkhiv, Karkat, and Oppent stopped me from going any further, their PARE scanners all shrieking in disharmony.

“The PARE measures the shifting of tectonic plates,” Karkat said to me in a soft, sullen voice. “Mini earthquakes. Imperceptible to us, usually. Bigger one shook your first night. Disturbs vents in the earth. Causes the release of toxic gases, often odorless.”

“We’re tracking pockets of electromagnetic disturbances,” Oppent said to me another time. “You ever notice how the Taiga becomes silent like Lung’s fishing boats at twilight? The silence coincides with oscillating readings of electromagnetic waves.” They always left out the presence of the staircases. Sorkhiv threatened to replace me when I brought them up.

“That would have been helpful to know. Animals, especially birds, are biologically sensitive to magnetic disturbances; they use it to navigate while migrating.”

“It makes the hair on my body stand up,” Boriv said yet another time. “It makes me feel like a spooked mountain lion.”

“Our hair puffs up to make us appear bigger to predators,” I said, and the genuine delight in his surprised laughter made me laugh too. That day, we were headed back, and I caught a glimpse of a moss- and vine-covered metal staircase about forty feet away, all twisted up in a harpy thorn thicket. I said nothing, even as my hair stood on end, and surreptitiously stared at it, just like every time. We weren’t supposed to talk about the staircases. We weren’t supposed to talk about the PARE scanners, either, but we still did when Sorkhiv went off to smoke. A few minutes later, the PARE scanners beeped and beeped, and silence fell upon the Taiga, and we hurried to safety as a unit. We never returned to the same spots; we made our way around the extensive boundary of the Taiga. Around this point I suspected the SSOD, or perhaps one of the enemies of the state, fiddled about with technologies we weren’t privy to as civilians.

Three weeks in, a harpy thorn penetrated the ball of my right hand. That day, there had been no incidents. The PARE scanners remained silent all afternoon, and the scaups and the rubripes and the green-winged teals and the woodpeckers filled the air with flutters and clicks and twits. We worked in a clearing as I took somewhat sloppy samples of a particularly large spread of harpy thorn bushes between glugs of my flask. We had yet to find another genetic line; I hypothesized that if we traveled deep into the Taiga, we might finally locate an ancestor of the bush. My hair kept tangling, streaks of premature grey among black, and I waved my hands about. Boriv chuckled at me and Sorkhiv smirked and smoked and watched. 

Then in my periphery I saw a glint. A spectacularly marble-cut white staircase stood quite a distance away, caught in the rare rays of reddening sun that somehow slipped through the endless black rows of sky-piercing trees. How could I have missed it, even at that distance? Boriv and Sorkhiv looked at me, but I looked only at the staircase, gleaming white and red and wet, and at whoever descended rapidly from the staircase’s peak, hidden far up in the skeletal branches. I knocked over a toolbox with a step back, pointing with my left hand. Then the person abruptly turned towards us. I blinked in astonishment-- they stood dozens of feet closer, silhouetted-- they made jerky, silent movements, falling down, leaping up, stumbling, tumbling, twitching toward us; fast, way too fast. Wet chunks of black mud or clay fell from their body.

“Rashmi, your hand!” I felt it then, the sharp acidic burn. The harpy thorn had punctured over an inch beneath my thumb. I hadn’t even noticed until the fine needle-tip tapered into its thicker stalk. Boriv dove for the medical kit. How long had it been in me? No wonder-- no wonder! I boasted a charmed childhood and routine adult life. I owned no previous experience to draw upon in suddenly dire instants. 

I uttered and pointed more emphatically when Sorkhiv grabbed my arm, turned my face away from the staircase and the jerking, impossible movements of the person, and shouted, “Don’t look-- don’t give it your attention!” His PARE scanner stirred and chirped, urgent.

“But it’s coming here, it’s coming here!” My clumsy tongue felt thick, and my heart thudded like the sound the forest floor made when hundreds of our feet thrashed upon it mid-December, and my legs and arms and fingers and muscles twitched like flaming marionettes on a bouncing string. I itched and burned between two poles: to run away, to run to the staircase; if I was going to die then it would be better to get to the staircase and find out the truth before I lost all my senses. I struggled against Sorkhiv’s grip. All around my peripheries stretched amorphous shadows, and these sounds like discordant violins emerged from the silence and wailed closer and closer and louder and louder and further and further and quieter and quieter and back again, pulling the notes along endless invisible threads, pulling them until they disappeared from observable range-- they belonged to the trilling of silvery needle-thin fangs and whiskers of things we couldn’t see, things that stalked us every time we went in the Taiga, things that came from underneath the earth-- they communicated in vibrations we couldn’t detect, raising our hair, frightening the birds-- the military had nothing to do with it except that they tried now to contain it, and somehow the appearance of the harpy thorns was linked to these creatures-- and somehow the staircases were involved-- and Priya was, too-- Priya looked aghast over Sorkhiv’s straining shoulder-- I shouted for her and shouted and shouted all of that before Boriv finally readied the syringe and relieved me of my delirium.

Four days later, in Sorkhiv’s metallic, claustrophobic office I watched the security footage of myself on one of eight monitors. In the containment unit, I flung all my clothes off and stood for hours, cellulite and all, quite still except for violent bouts of juddering and twitching. I ignored food and water for two days until somebody bore me down and forced me. I twisted my hair all up and into itself and my fingers and paced. I cracked my nails to splinters and tore my fingertips to raw strips with my teeth. I muttered nonsense and groaned and said it was too loud, that the sea serpents breaking apart all that rotten wood nearby might as well tear my eardrums out before the orchestra bled them out. I shrank into corners with my hands over my ears; I traced nonsensical shapes in the room with enormous white-rimmed eyes; I frenetically bit at the foam adhesive bandage covering the swollen bruised ball of my right hand; for a duration of twelve hours my head turned this way and that at random before I leapt and pounded on the glass, shrieking to be let out and drooling, my eyes twisting in their sockets. For an entire twenty-four hours I stood underneath the air vent, sweating feverishly and gnawing my lips and palm and fingertips, and watched the lens of the camera as if it were the eyes of some kind of predator. Sorkhiv didn’t show me all of the footage. He paused the video and swung around in his chair with his arms crossed.

“That was highly educational,” I said. “Did you take samples of my blood, urine, hair? MRI? This is an exciting step forward, despite my error.”

“Yes, we did all that,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “but SSOD took the files. Colonel Hampin requires that I report to him by seven o’ clock every evening. Your role here has been terminated. I couldn’t have left all this out.”

“Would you have?”

“No,” he said, raising his white eyebrows and glancing meaningfully at the Rangers badge sewn on his shirt. I thought maybe there was a mic hidden there, or the badge symbolized his honour-bound duty to the Rangers. Either way, it appeared we all writhed like worms beneath some nebulous black boot.

I went outside the post to find Boriv in the center of a massive undulating fog of smoke and breath. I had drug-dimmed recollections of sinking my teeth and nails into him on the way back to the outpost. Proudly he showed me the wounds on his shoulders and neck. At twenty-three years old, the incident seemed only to prove to him his strength and usefulness. I apologized over and over, then asked if he had seen the footage. He said yes, eyes downcast. They all had. It had nothing to it but scientific purpose, he swore. I told him I didn’t mind; at my age and profession, my modesty was the last thing I cared for.

“Is it?” he asked me, and he tried to kiss me.

“Boriv! I’m twenty-one years your senior. I’m paunchy, I have grey streaks, and I have a spiderweb on my face, for God’s sake.”

“I like it,” he said in a low dreamy voice. “You look witchy. All you need is a gigantic droopy hat. I started making one for you, you know. It’s almost done.” Then he looked at the ground and bunched his shoulders around his ears and sucked his lips in.

“A bog witch, maybe. I’ll take the hat when you finish, though. It’s getting tits-cold.” I brought our cold brown hands together in a deliberately maternal fashion-- our hands were about the same size; we were both quite bear-like in stature, now that I thought about it-- and added, “Look, direct your attentions to Karkat instead.”

“Really? I thought she and Oppent…”

“Well, yes, but you’re all young, under thirty-five. I’ve heard them talk; they aren’t serious. This is quite the isolated job, I understand. I’ve seen her looking extensively, you know.” That was a lie; I’d seen her stare appraisingly at Boriv once, top to bottom and bottom to top, from the corners of her eyes. She barely spoke, that one, and I hoped I’d just done them a favour, but who knew. Boriv made a show of wiping his hands and showing me his palms to indicate he understood the conversation we’d just had.

That night I packed up some essentials: my heat-retaining coat; strappable belts; matches; notebooks; phials; dried fruit; jerky; cans of barley soup; my working gloves; tape recorders; tapes; a lantern and oil; bottles of water; a rucksack. I stole out of my quarters to find quite a fair, earnest replica of a witch hat, enormous and dark, with the tip drooping down the side outside my door and a note. I put on the hat and took the note, but didn’t read it; I cast it into a bin on my way out. In storage, the PARE scanners and some pistols were locked up. I thought about finding a blunt object and breaking the lock then decided against it. This would be a short excursion to satisfy my curiosity, nothing more. I’d be back, and I didn’t want SSOD on my ass about theft of property on top of a potential trespassing charge now that my clearance badge had been taken away. If needed, I could use the lantern’s flame against animals like our primordial ancestors.

I trekked down the stairs of the post and out into the beckoning darkness of the Witherwood Taiga, the lantern flickering and hitched to my belts. My legs shook from days of stress, but I wouldn’t get another opportunity; I was to get a ride back to Lung the next morning, stripped of chances and supplies to pursue this.

After a thirty minute hike, I had only one incident where I stumbled and fell over a thick root, then wetly cracked the back of my skull against a black trunk. I found the marble staircase there. The Taiga cooed and rustled around me. I took my lens and the lantern and investigated the staircase for a serial number or graffiti or a logo, but found nothing. I went to the front of the staircase and put a foot onto the marble step. The stairs reached high into the blackness and the trees, far outside my orange sphere of lantern light. I took three steps up. Something in the Taiga made a sound like a distant violin, everything else falling into silence. My hair stood, then, and my teeth chattered, but I ascended, focus blearing with every head throb. Somewhere in this enormous wilderness, twenty-seven years ago, Priya had perished searching for somebody, anybody.

The staircase ended abruptly, maybe eighty feet up. I almost fell. I sat down and drank feverishly. The air crowded me, hot and coffin-stale. The stray, discordant violin notes flew about below, gaining in intensity. I investigated my body-- did I somehow prick myself again? I found nothing, but my extremities had gone numb. Blood and sweat flowed down my neck. My ears rang with varying pitches, closer and closer, splitting open my leaking skull like fault-lines in tectonic plates, so I covered them and shut my eyes until it stopped.

I jerked back into awareness, the black air swollen with dampness and my throat raw and gritty. My hands pressed against a crumbling, wet wall of dirt, palms stinging with exposed wounds. Feeling around, the wet dirt walls curled everywhere. I couldn’t find my lantern or my rucksack or my belts, but my tape recorder bulged in my pocket. I followed the sound of crickets and the faint feeling of wind on my face. Then I ascended into a lighter darkness and a heavy rain up a steep, frost-hard, dug-out dirt staircase with difficulty. It took over an hour to reach the top.

“I told you that would happen, Warden,” said someone once I breached the surface. They had a voice like wet, grinding stones. An impossible nectarine fell by my feet. One of my shoes had somehow vanished. In my trembling grimy hands, I sucked the juices from it and then the flesh from the pit while my throat burned. The trees and I stood, alone and endless. I pulled my tape recorder out.

On the tape, after some static, the same odd voice said, “Hello. You lost some of your gut. You need to bathe. Your hut is a mess. I am going borrow your hat now or the rain will soften me into mud and it will take some time to find you again.”

“You are an insolent golem, Cricket,” I heard myself say, but I sounded amused. 

“And you are foolish, Warden,” Cricket said. “Have a fig. Why would you go onto that staircase?”

“Something hit my head, bounced off, and landed on the steps. I went up to get it--”

“You did not go up. You went down. They all go down. You know this. I told you this.”

“I know, but thorns keep nicking me. Pass me my flask.”

“Warden, if you have much more, an ethylic coma awaits you.”

“Cheers, then. Try not to turn into a puddle before I wake up to the grimviolos’ lullabies or beatles gnawing on my bone marrow.” In the background, hissing on the tape, the violin sounds whirled faintly and unevenly.

“ _ Warden _ ,” Cricket said. I laughed on the tape. I understood why, with that inhuman voice in such a scandalized tone. 

“It was Rosie Trevor’s shoe,” I said on the tape. “Brand new, clean. There’s a sock with a mango pattern inside. She disappeared twenty-eight years ago, and her shoe landed on the top of my head.”

“She looked at a staircase too much, thought about it too much. I tried to guide her out, but she would not follow me. By then she quivered with fright; already the grimviolos’ song accosted her, and she was cold. So I thought to use her fright to her benefit and pursued her from a distance in an attempt to chase her to safety. Then she ran down a new staircase that opened for her. They’ve been opening for you, too. I am not allowed to touch without permission, so I could not stop her without heading her off, and to do that I would have had to sink into the deep earth.”

“I know the golem fear that you’ll be swallowed up into the primordial soil for good if you go too deep down, but you should have tried anyway. She was a child, Cricket. Her parents think she’s dead.”

“But we know the truth, Warden.” Cricket sounded earnest, in high spirits, as if she’d winked. Static burst, drowning out my reply. “This has always been outside their scope.”

“The mucking about with electromagnetic technology didn’t help.”

“No, it did not. It is good that you are here, Warden. Many humans have a primal phobia of the inexplicable.”

“I’ve always had a healthy appreciation for the diversity of lifeforms.”

The damaged tape cut out into static there. I found only one other tape on me out of the five I left with, but it was empty. That’s the tape I’m recording on now. The chances are small that this will ever reach Sorkhiv and the others, but it might reach someone, like sending a letter in a bottle into a guarded void. To you: I swear it’s real. I swear I’ve never been in such good physical or mental health as I am at this moment, speaking beneath a towering Siberian Larch and gazing at the tessellated walls of our odd little home in perpetual exile from sunlight. I’ve been accidentally pricked by a harpy thorn a dozen times, and each time I lose days or weeks of recollection. That’s what happened that first night, and those fractured days later, Cricket found me again shortly after the rain passed. She always finds me and waits at whatever staircase I’ve scrambled to in manic obsession. I believe the thorns operate as a type of organic lure for some other organism, perhaps the grimviolos. Cricket tells me the truth is not too far from that belief.

Our home sits at the center leyline junction-- if you find the other tapes, you’ll know what those are. Mapped out, they look like a giant spider web, just like the growth patterns of the harpy thorn, just like my vitiligo, funny how that is. We’ve called it Felicity’s Glen. We’re fixing the corrupted network of leylines, but it’s tough work. You know, it’s not just the wild animals and the grimviolos to avoid. The SSOD, and the Western Air Marshals, and the Piring Staunchers creep about too, all trying to contain the Taiga so that they’ll be free to exploit it.

I’ve attached a colour-coded map, courtesy of Cricket the cartographer, which marks the safe areas. You’ve found this tape and this map on the cleansed leyline we’ve called Linger. If you have a PARE scanner and track the oscillating pockets of electromagnetic disturbances-- that’s Cricket’s guiding system network-- you should be able to find your way back out relatively safely. 

This is my last tape. I’ll repeat what I’ve said at the end of the others: stay away from the _ avoirrus aventus _ entirely and leave when the Taiga gets silent and cold and do not pay attention to the staircases; do not think of them. Cricket says they’re metaphysical representations of realm windows that our primitive human brains haven’t evolved enough to be capable of correctly interpreting, and we’d find their true appearance highly, inarticulably alarming, like a two-dimensional circle gazing upon a sphere. She tried to help us by making them look both ordinary enough to prevent contemplation yet bizarre enough to disencourage proximity, but her experience with our species has been limited. She says it was necessary to try, since observing the realm windows alerts them to your presence and so they observe you in return, and that’s how the grimviolos find you. I’ve found without the staircase facade these realm windows resemble something like an endless descent into the ground, but I suspect some part of Cricket’s most primal fears projects that into place each time. I assume whatever form they truly take would be as fearful to us as an unstoppable endless descent back into the womb of the earth--disintegration into non-existence-- is to a golem.

Cricket found me before anything else did. She doesn’t let me bring harpy thorn samples into the hut, and she tells me the exact percentage of my regenerated liver health every week, and she counts and organizes my phials by size and contents alphabetically every day, and she counts the increasing number of grey hairs on my head, and she counts the number of raindrops that plummet to our roof. Her numbers are a metronome that put me to sleep each night. That well-cherished flask has gathered quite a bit of dust, I tell you. Boriv, Cricket shares your partiality for ‘witchiness’ and paunch and stretchmarks and cellulite because she’s made out of baked clay in the sun and melted matter in the rain and she’s as timeless and formless as the early Earth. Golems are quite the study: I’ve touched her core and it feels like a hot, malleable geode. It floats, concealed in the belly, suspended, shifting; an asymmetrical conglomerate of base metals, quartz, glass, seawater, air pockets, inexplicable flashes of amber and lazuli light, all of it spinning gently in that concentration of her construct. A core’s composition is unique to every golem, like fingerprints, and how odd it is that now my fingerprints, and only my fingerprints, exist on the surface of Cricket’s. Cricket says someday her core will grow as ancient and grand as the Earth’s core, and that even then my fingerprints will remain.

We take turns wearing your hat outside. Cricket says it was a lovely gift. I don’t think I will return to Lung, even after our work concludes. Where I live, the song of the grimviolos has become beautiful in its meaning. We can end the chaos and bring them back, all of them; and Rosie Trevor, and Priya too. Priya! Every day your voice grows nearer.

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